Every Precious Failure
by kenopsia
Summary: John Watson is not a fan of alphas. His beta flatmate Sherlock Holmes is also not a fan of alphas. 221b is a no-knots-allowed club. An omegaverse story where no one has a knot.
1. Chapter 1

John Watson is not a fan of alphas. He's not bigoted, of course, he's got an alpha sister and she'd give him a cuff round the ears if she thought there was some ism she hadn't kicked out of him when he'd been a teenager.

He has plenty of alpha friends – hell, half of his brothers-in-arms are alphas, but as far as people John Watson wants in his bed, there is approximately one alpha on the list, and John explains him away as a statistical outlier. Bill Murray has an androgen-insensitivity and a tongue that could take the gold for England, were there any tongue-gymnastics sports that you could put on the telly pre-watershed. John considers him an honorary beta.

When Mike introduces John to Sherlock, who is tall and broad and smells like synthetic beta body wash, John makes the logical assumption.

John really isn't sexist, or a transphobe. At their first stakeout, he says, "So you're a beta, then," to let him know that regardless of his knot, John's not about to misgender him at every turn. Sherlock had turned a cool gaze on him as he practically sneered, "I'm flattered by your interest, but I think you should know, I'm married to my work."

John scoffed at him. "No, Sherlock. I just meant, it's all fine." And it had been. Fantastic, even. John gets kidnapped by Sherlock's older brother, John shoots a cabbie, John is somehow ridiculously charmed by this horrible man who is all-go mania interspersed with bouts of lethargy where he camps on the couch so long John wonders if moss will grow on his dressing gown.

He dates Sarah, a beta, and Sherlock does his best to muck that up. Sherlock mucks it up, and John surprises himself by not minding. John spends a lot of time not minding the terrible things Sherlock does.

John comes home to the kitchen smelling like a mix of pheromones, Sherlock shifting liquids from one beaker to another, his cheeks flushed and looking like the advert for a My First Science kit. It's the curls, he's coming to recognize, in the morning, frizzed out, he looks so young. John is startled by a sudden whim – he could kiss him, he thinks. Walk right past him and drop a kiss on that fuzzy head on his way to the fridge.

He reminds himself that he does not kiss alphas. He keeps telling himself that all day, over and over, like his tongue returning to poke at a cut inside his mouth. Concentric circles: _you are not attracted to people-with-knots,_ he amends, remembering not to be rude, and then even further: _ you are not attracted to Sherlock Holmes._ He's not trying to misgender Sherlock, but after four months of living with Sherlock, John still isn't sure if he pretends to be a beta because it is more convenient for the work, or if he actively identifies as a beta.

Honestly, they don't talk about permutations, after that initial awkward moment in the café that had cleared up approximately zero percent of John's questions, but John owed Sherlock some privacy after he was kind enough not to mention the fact that John is queer, or at least, he doesn't particularly align with typical alpha/omega dynamics.

John gets an updated glimpse into Sherlock's sexuality during a case.

There is a dead omega in bed. There are rose petals trampled on the floor.

"This is a four," Sherlock drawls, after his initial assessment of the room, the omega student, and her ransacked closet. "And I am being generous."

"There's no signs of forced entry, a ransacked closet, a computer tampered with but not stolen, and a dead omega who, by all reports, is adjusted as hell." Lestrade huffs out through his mouth. "Alright, Sherlock. Go for the big reveal: you know you're dying to."

Sherlock is on fire in an instant: drops his drawl and picks up overdrive as he points out the string of details. "Two jobs and a full course load, her syllabi tacked side by side with her work schedule and colour coded notes. Apron with baking flour, her hat from a second café job in her top drawer."

"Notes from the upcoming unit, laminated and near her bed for downtime, her dehumidifier running on full blast, and did you notice the desk? Smart kid, dedicated kid like that? She's trying to keep her heat to a bare minimum, and study during. If she had the money for suppressors, she would be on them."

When Sherlock gets going, he speaks faster than most people read. John grins in anticipation. He can tell from the speed that Sherlock's deductions are moving along that things are getting good. "She definitely was not planning on spending her heat with any partner, and you will find her consent and contact info conspicuously missing from her wallet, I am sure."

John is not following, but his eyes track the room as Sherlock points things out. Donovan, behind Sherlock, has a spine like a piano wire.

"What?" Lestrade asks. "Are you trying to call this a rape-gone-awry?"

Sherlock let out a long sigh. The sigh continues, and John wonders how long Sherlock can hold his breath, because he obviously has phenomenal lung capacity. "No," he says finally, moving to the victims fridge. "Even an omega trying to keep a heat under forty eight hours wouldn't have a fridge that looked like this - no complex carbs. She was actually still a good two days away from her heat. Look through her schedules," Sherlock instructs. "Work and school. Find an overlap, there is a class she's missed a few of lately and is falling behind in. She made an offer, probably to the professor or the TA, to share a heat in exchange for some kind of favor, or help, or the simple overlooking and refiling of attendance paperwork. She'd planned on acting the part for a day and a half, sure she'd be rid of him well before her actual estrus arrived. The plan probably came together in a moment of serendipity as she realized that his class sechedule lined up with her biology."

Donovan makes a noise of protest. "Jump from_ smart and dedicated_ to_ omega whore_ rather quickly, you hysterogynistic jerk."

Sherlock frowned. "You've rather shown your hand there, Donovan, with the words you're putting in my mouth. The woman is not being supported by family, taking on an overly full course load and has a pair of jobs known for keeping extremely early and extremely late hours, respectively. I suspect to be maintaining the way she is, she's trained herself to some form of polyphasic sleeping, very possibly of her own design. She keeps her heater off, habitually. She probably hates the loss of control inherent in the whole ordeal. If she thought that faking thirty hours of a heat was a plausible trade for getting her studies back in order, _whore _is certainly not among the most prominent thoughts I have about her."

Donovan, by the end of Sherlock's speech, looks floored, slack jawed. She snaps out of it quickly, bristling still. "Well, what would you call her, then?"

"Misguided. Naïve. If she thought she could fool an alpha for a day and a half with acting and a dehumidifier to take the blame for a lack of pheromones. Likely, she informed him that she typically had light, short heats and she runs it constantly to keep maximum mental facilities, but that wouldn't fool any adult who had any experience. She may never have experienced a full heat in the presence of an alpha. Tragic that she felt like her continued success would depend on such a scheme."

"And … the TA? Why kill her?" Greg Lestrade looks tired, like a well-fitting shirt that's been through the wash too many times.

"I suspect he killed her when it became clear that she wasn't actually on the brink of a heat, as she'd indicated to him when she'd made the offer today. Possibly an accident, in the moment." Sherlock paces the room, swiveling on his heel every time he gets to the edge again. "But afterwards, he failed to have a typical remorse-reaction: she is neither posed to look like an accident, nor in any of the positions that usually indicate regret. He was calm enough to look through her computer for anything of academic importance that he might be interested in, and to find her wallet for her C&C card. Likely, when you find it, his name will be on it, and he took that with him. The closet is a last minute measure to make it look like a robbery gone wrong."

"Alphas," Sherlock says, in conclusion. "They're completely useless. You can maneuver them anywhere with thought that they might get to press their genitals into something small, and their tiny little brains just catch fire when they think that may not be the case."

Sally looks murderous as Sherlock turns on his heels. He doesn't say _come along, John,_ like he's a hound, but it seems to hang in the air nonetheless. He nods at the two officers at the cene and scrambles to catch up.

John's therapist thinks John is obsessed with Sherlock.

John knows this because she's written_ persistent obsession with flatmate,_ and John, who can be just as childish as Sherlock when he really puts his mind to it, tells her about him for another twenty minutes.

For the first time, she has to cut him off. He would be embarrassed, but he is still too busy, after a week, thinking about how Sherlock is strange and tactless and sees so often to miss all social cues, but somehow, that omega in uni, eighteen and stressed and desperate had somehow caught Sherlock's sympathies. He thinks of Sherlock saying _tragic _and Donovan's face, and he doesn't explain all of that to Ella Thompson, because some things are private and she doesn't know that he's seen an omega murdered in her own bed so recently that he could draw her from memory against the back of his eyelids.

"Huh," he muses, looking at the clock. "Ta very much," he says, excusing himself. On the walk home, Sherlock's voice echoes in his ears, _not among the more prominent thoughts I had about her,_ and there is something in Sherlock that he's missed, somehow.

"You've been somewhere unusual," Sherlock says from the sofa. John assumes that he is on the couch, at least.

"Why are you sitting in the dark, Sherlock?" John asks, flipping on the light in the doorway. He'd meant to be discrete, of course, with his shopping, but trust Sherlock to sniff out his embarrassment before he even steps over the threshold.

Sherlock made a bored, vague loop with the arm dangling off the side of the sofa. "It was daytime, earlier."

John edges towards the stairs, but Sherlock smells blood in the water. One sniff, John knows, will be like handing Sherlock a calendar with red letter days circled in triplicate. He may identify as a beta, but his biology is all alpha. It would be in poor taste for John to mention it.

"Let me have a look," Sherlock says, planting himself between John and his exit.

"Not appropriate, Sherlock," John says. He feels this might be kinder than calling his flatmate a wanker, but that step is rapidly approaching.

"Oh," Sherlock says, voice going flat. "Biology, then. Dull."

John can feel something in his blood moving restless, like he's been carbonated. It always feels like this. At some point in the next forty-eight hours he is going to have to have an adult discussion with Sherlock, but Sherlock starts avoiding him.

As his heat draws near, and he hasn't seen Sherlock in a solid thirty six hours, John assumes that Sherlock has decided that discretion is the better part of valor and has made a strategic retreat for a few days. He sends a text anyways: **have everything you need from flat? locking door in 2 hrs.**

He's not sweating yet when he gets a text back, **Will be in late tonight. SH**

**Don't. **he texts back. **haven't gone into full ht in almost a yr, SH. whatever suprssrs yr on, not going to keep you out.**

**As usual, you see but do not observe. Put a wet towel across the crack under your door. Pheromones make me itchy. SH.**

John moans in despair, too close to his heat starting in full force to make other arrangements. He thinks about calling Harry, who would come sit outside his door if he asked. Embarrassingly enough, it wouldn't be the first time she'd helped out with a heat – when he was first back in London he'd rode one out in her spare bedroom, all sisterly sniping aside when she brought him water and carded her hands through his hair as he tried to sleep fitfully.

He wavered for several minutes. If he called Harry, the whole thing was bound to be awkward, but she will surely arrive, make herself at home in their living room to revise her history textbook, which she rewrites all hours of the day, one eye on Sherlock's door.

He's even sure she won't mention it for a few days out of her surprising dynamic etiquette. The tact his sister seems to lack in literally every other area in life seems to have all been allocated to gender matters.

The downside being his unruly flatmate who would scan her and give his most scathing assessment. He'd know in an instant: see the way she holds herself, or her rolled shirtsleeves, or the fact that she hasn't had a haircut since. Sherlock Holmes would squint at all of the tiny details and read the truth and of course he would say a terrible thing, ask if Clara is buried where their parents are, or something equally tactless and Harry would dissolve into a saltwater mess.

Instead, he drafts a text to her as well. **Going to start my heat in abt an hr.**

**Solo? **she asks, immediately. She's nonplussed by the whole thing: John has always told her she was born to be a hystrologist, but she always laughs. "I'm a historian, John. Phonetically speaking, we're practically the same thing."

**Y. Can you call around 12 or 1 tmrrw? Possibility of some turbulence.**

**Want me to come over now? **she asks, but John doesn't answer. He's starting to feel overheated, so he pulls his jumper over his head, folding it neatly before sitting down to pant for a few minutes.

**No ty, just call if I don't chk in pls.**

John puts his phone in a drawer and pads over in his trousers and vest to deal with the other minutia: water tucked between his headboard and the wall, other materials hefted up from their discrete box under the bed (the box had been labeled books/misc when he'd moved in; Sherlock had let him it be known in the following week that he had noticed John only had three books to his name).

John's heart thudded heavily, making a swishing baseline reverberate in the hollow of his throat. In the next two hours, he would become a sweaty, needy mess, unable to do all but the most basic of functions. He wouldn't even remember how much he liked his body when the entirety of it was a knot-free zone. Anxiety gripped him, but he did his best to relax.

If John had learned one thing, it was that his flatmate was singular. If someone he knew could ignore an omega in the flat in heat, John would put money on Sherlock, right after he put his money on Bill Murray.

He put the towel across the door, climbed into his narrow bed, and settled in for a miserable weekend.


	2. Chapter 2

There is a wet towel under his door. His temperature is climbing, heat settling behind his eyes until his brain is uncomfortably muggy. John loses an article of clothing at a time until he reaches the point of limited brain function where instead of doing something normal for the evening, settling down with the paper or crap telly, his hands find his genitals.

It is a bit like being in secondary school; John feels a guilty thrill and jumps at every noise the flat makes, expecting his flatmate at every creaky pipe or cab he can hear outside. Sweat pools between his shoulder blades for agonizing minutes, stretching into hours as he manhandles himself. It's _on_ rather than _in_ for the most part, which alphas who watch a lot of porn don't typically get.

John's cups his cock, demure and rosy and curled upwards into his hand. He's been with alphas before, and they always mention his_ sweet little cock_ but they rarely handle it like he wants it handled. At twenty he'd somehow acquired a twenty-five year old alpha to spend his heat with, gorgeous and lithe and he wanted her from somewhere close to his core: he was thirsty with wanting for her, and she'd leaned over, sexy, confident and smelling unmistakably of alpha pheromones. He'd fancied himself in love, for three glorious, terrible, sticky days.

"What do you want?" she'd whispered, coy and smiling, and he'd been completely unspooled. Breathless.

"Will you," he'd gasped, having trouble keeping track of his own thoughts with her nails raking across the back of his neck. Every inch of his skin was so sensitive. "Can you suck me?" he'd finally asked, and she'd laughed a scandalized laugh.

"Kinky," she'd said, like it had been a joke, and he'd laughed it off with her, embarrassed.

The rest of his heat had gone well enough, John supposed, although afterwards she'd tried to call him and he'd made excuses, he was bury, he had an exam coming up, he didn't feel well, until she stopped inviting him out and John felt relieved.

His first blowjob had come from another omega, actually, in a fumbling uni experiment, outside of either of their heats. Afterwards she had leaned on his chest and said, "I'm not big on alphas, actually." Her face had been flushed red with the warmth of the admission, and John remembers it fondly every time someone puts their mouth around him. "I just … I feel like… having genitals is humiliating enough. I shouldn't have to beg, in bed."

Which, admittedly, was a strange thought for an omega to have, seeing as most of them spend three or four days per quarter whispering _please please please_ even if there is no one there to plead with.

John won't be whispering for a good twenty four hours. The first day of his heat is just uncomfortable. Honestly, if he had no other options, John could probably work through the first eighteen hours or so. He sat an exam once, until his beta instructor had excused him when other present alphas began to squirm in their seats.

By day two, he will be pressing foreign objects inside of himself, crying, cursing the day he was born – the whole thing is wretched and embarrassing, and the worst part: fertile. Harry, of course, will call around the stage change, like he's asked her to, and he's already informed her that he plans to ride it out himself. If she feels like something is off, and she has terrifying instincts, John knows she can trust him to climb through the window with her cricket bat from school strapped across her back.

Sherlock comes back to Baker street after midnight.

John's just managed to doze off, and he wakes with a start when he hears the front door close behind him. His heart thuds in his tongue like he's bitten it.

His mind swirls in anxiety with no resolution for fifteen minutes before his heart settles back into its familiar rhythm.

"John?" Sherlock says, his voice right outside John's bedroom door. John doesn't answer, but Sherlock waits patiently. John definitely doesn't hear him move away, so he can only assume he is there, statue still.

"A bit not good, Sherlock." John says, holding his breath, just in case Sherlock's androgen gland is trying to seduce him through the door.

"Let me in. I brought you a takeaway."

"No, Sherlock. But, ah, thank you."

"John, I think I can help you." Come to think of it, Sherlock sounds very calm, and John feels rather suspicious.

"Sherlock, what kind of suppressors are you on?" John demands, kicking out with suddenly restless legs; too much energy and nowhere to put it.

"I'm _not_, John. Try not to be pedantic."

If nothing else, curiosity gets John to his feet. He moves to open the door a crack, but puts his foot behind in to keep Sherlock out and his own nude body out of his (perceptive) line of sight. "What do you mean, you're not…"

True to his word, Sherlock has a bag in his hands that smells divine. And he looks rather bored. "I mean there are more effective ways of keeping hormones at bay."

That sets off alarm bells in John's head. Behind the smell of fried food, which he always craves during his off-balance time, Sherlock smells less chemical than he usually does. It's sweet. Fresh. John finds his mouth watering, and he's not sure what he's responding to.

"What?" John demands, when his brain catches up to what Sherlock's just said. "You aren't androgen insensitive – I've seen you use pheromones in your deductions. What's more effective than suppressors?"

"That question is a_ bit not good_. But not being an alpha helps, too," Sherlock snarls, turning on his heel after he shoves the bag into John's arms. "Goodnight John."

There is too much food in the bag. If Sherlock were someone else, someone with regular human senses, John would have thought perhaps he hadn't known what John would want, and maybe bought some extra things just in case. But Sherlock isn't someone else, and he has picked out all of John's favorite things with unfailing accuracy, and there are still extras.

Not only has Sherlock been incredibly thoughtful, John thinks, he'd been planning on eating with him.

Which is stupid, of course. Rude, definitely, to think John would want to eat with him during the first day of his grouchy, itchy heat. Except, Sherlock doesn't do social norms, he does not pay attention to biology if it does not pertain to a crime, and he … he does not bring home take away.

John, because he is a git, has offended Sherlock, misgendered him again. John doesn't care what kind of genitals Sherlock was born with, and he's let him know, time and time again, that he considers him a beta for all intents and purposes. It's the hormone deep, unconscious reactions he is trying to avoid.

Except…

Sherlock had looked clear eyed when he'd stood at John's door.

And honestly, if he goes to visit Sherlock and they fall into bed, worst things have happened. He's been knotted before, hundreds of times, probably, if you count individual instances and not a half-dozen blurry memories of heats once they get started. Harry will make sure John doesn't get pregnant tomorrow if she has to pull someone out of him, herself.

It may be the heat leading him, but he feels sane enough. John puts on his dressing gown, gathers up the food, and makes his way across the flat.

John has never been in Sherlock's room. He shuffles from foot to foot in front of Sherlock's door. John is well aware of the moment Sherlock becomes aware of his presence, because he begins to play an atonal mess on his violin.

"Sherlock!" John hisses. "It's not a decent hour for that!"

"Did you need something?" Sherlock asks, opening his door. Behind him, John can see his room which isn't so much messy as filled to the brim with things.

"I … uh, you forgot your dinner." It sounds lame to his own ears. "I came to bring it to you."

"No thank you," Sherlock says, in a voice with no inflection. "I had a really big lunch."

John goes to leave, but Sherlock says, "Wait," and then John does, but maybe Sherlock hasn't thought this far because he looks surprised that John is still there, and it takes him a moment to finish. "I just thought you might be itchy," Sherlock blurts out awkwardly.

"I am unbearably itchy," John admits.

Sherlock directs John to lie down on his bed, and John goes, his feet obeying without his brain. It's positively pavlovian.

"Pull off your dressing gown."

"I'm not wearing any—" John starts to protest.

"My bed has seen far worse experiments," Sherlock says, and John lowers himself after wrapping his dressing gown awkwardly around his hips like a towel.

"You know I can't stay long," John says. He's trying not to feel embarrassed, but Sherlock's scrutiny – the weight of his full attention – is like a heat lamp. Damp is beginning to collect between his legs.

"Yes, I've seen your C&C."

John goes to protest his flatmate's gross invasion of privacy, but the bed shifts next to him, and Sherlock's fingers come to rest briefly between his shoulder blades before they trail down his spine, and back up, in a gentle, unpredictable mix of fingertips and nails, sliding in a long, meandering path.

His skin is too warm under his hands, and he finds himself willing Sherlock's hands lower, to the backs of his thighs and kneecaps and all of the things he shouldn't be wanting, suspended because of his bloody heat.

John's brain short circuits, and doesn't come back online until he hears himself make a strange, needy noise, and Sherlock moves away.

"You should go," Sherlock frowns, holding his hands clasped together at his throat.

John leaves, although it takes some convincing his legs that he's on solid ground. They wobble embarrassingly as he goes into the hallway, where he doesn't even bother with the gown.

Behind him, something whirs into life. John realizes, with a strange tightness in his chest, that it is a humidifier.

Sherlock leaves the flat around the point that John's heat has reached the animistic stage where he is rutting against his bed in an pheromone induced haze. He shouts to let John know he is going to the morgue, and to call if he needs anything.

"Not me!" he shouts, because he is a bastard, "but someone!"

John would be laughing if he wasn't gritting his teeth against his own pillow. He gives one thump against the wall for yes because that seems like a natural sort of shorthand. John, if he was functioning at normal hormone levels, would be grateful that Sherlock left before he devolved to crying.

At noon, his sister called, and he let it ring out before he text her **all well, tx **with shaky hands.

His phone rings again and he answers it with a huff. "Watson."

"Watson," she says back, airily. "Just calling my favorite brother to make sure he's still lonely."

"I did …" John says, very willfully not touching himself with his older sister on the phone. He breathes out harshly. "Text."

"Any idiot can pretend to be you on text, John, as long as they misplace half of the middle vowels and don't text back too quickly."

"Well," he says.

"Alright, Johnny, if you're alright," she says like a question.

"I'm fine. Thanks Harry."

"Should I call back this time tomorrow?"

"No thanks. I think… I think I misunderstood. Hey, sis, I've really… Don't want to be crass, but I've got to go."

He hangs up on his laughing sister.

John spends two days in unrelenting misery, interspersed with short naps he wakes up from sweatier than he drifted off. He cries and it's stupid, so stupid, that his biology can turn him into this begging thing. He has a short, fat plug for his seam, which opens during his heat, dripping everywhere like some sort of slug.

The plug leaves his hands free and one claws at the skin of his torso – itchy, he imagines Sherlock's hands for the sense-memory of their soothing properties, but he has to make do with only his own – and another for his cock, dabbing at his seam for lubrication when he begins to chafe. By the end of his heat, his abused cock is retracted almost completely back up to recover, and his seam is so unbelievably sore.

He feels clean for the first time in days when Sherlock comes back to the flat with a carton of milk. "I come bearing gifts," he says, cautiously.

John, freshly showered, takes it from him. "No one's going to make you itchy. I've been cleaning for an hour."

John is in a pair of denims his sister bought him when he first came home. They were smaller than he'd been used to wearing – he'd lost so much muscle as he'd been laid up, recovering from surgery, and then more, as infection set in – but they were starting to fit snugly again, as he spent his time chasing his madman around the city.

"I didn't mean to … earlier," Sherlock said.

"No one's going to make you talk about your feelings, either," John shrugged. "We'll pretend it never happened."

"I mean," Sherlock looked pained, as if each word was root canal, a painful extraction, "I didn't plan on leaving you to deal alone."

"We weren't going to have sex, Sherlock," John frowned.

"I know that!" Sherlock snapped. "I just meant to be present in case anything went wrong – but I couldn't…"

This is it, John thought: this is your life now. You are not getting out of this room without talking about feelings and sexuality and gender expression, and for once, John fervently wished he could go back to 1995 to listen to Harry harping on and on.

And then, Sherlock throws him a curve ball. "I feared I would trigger a pseudo-heat with you nearby in a full on heat, and I spend a lot of time and chemicals keeping that from happening."

Baker street returns to normal.

Sherlock texts him at the clinic with demands. Sherlock begins to label the plastic wrap in the fridge after John begins playing pop music at all hours of the day. John discovers, to his great alarm, that Sherlock keeps all stray bits of John found around the flat in baggies. He discovers this because an experiment gone awry has led to his room being overtaken by large, pointy spiders, of which John is unashamed to be completely terrified by.

He prods at one, labeled with yesterday's date. "Sherlock."

"If you say_ not good_, John, I will personally rearrange your wardrobe out of whatever inane order you have your things organized by and into a hideousness index."

"Well," John sighs, "I'm glad you're, uh, aware."

"If I didn't know which things weren't socially acceptable, I wouldn't know which ones to hide_ in my private space_, now would I? Speaking of not good," Sherlock raises an eyebrow at John, who had been shamefully rifling through a box labeled_ John_.

"To be fair, it does have my name on it."

"You are but one of the dozens – if not hundreds – of John's I interact with on a daily basis."

John raised an eyebrow, and Sherlock changed tactics, his face springing from disdainful to softened lines in an instant. Even knowing that Sherlock was replicating emotions like a child in a school play, it still worked on him.

"You'll be grateful when I am called in to identify your remains and I don't have any uncertainties."

"You could probably identify me now if I just had the one pinky intact," John grumbled.

Sherlock snatched up his hand and peered closely. "Probably," he said, after a minute of careful observation. "Gun callus, scalpel scar, cuticles."

John took his hand back. It felt strangely warm. "Good to know."

"I should have you finger printed just in case. Wait here, John, I am going to fetch the ink."


	3. Chapter 3

John's consent and contact card was all but empty when he came back from the war. In the hospital, they'd had to pull him off his suppressants to avoid a conflict with his pain meds, and they'd tripped a latent heat. Even for a bullet-riddled vet, no one was about to summon Bill Murray from the front lines to help him deal with his unruly genitals.

He'd called his sister – there had been no one else.

Now, Sherlock could identify him by a single finger. Any of them. The knowledge should unsettle John, but instead it sits like a firefly in his rib cage – a warmth that feels like a secret. John finds himself looking down the list: _Bill Murray, Nora and Mike Stamford, Harriet Watson_, and thinking_ who else could do that_?

Someone tries to blow them up.

When James Moriarty leaves, Sherlock moves to him like running water. "People will talk," John says. Adrenaline keeps him upright, but it will be spent soon and there will be nothing but his own elastic muscles.

"People do little else," he says, and wrenches John's jacket off – throws it like it's offended him, the explosives next. John's always been able to rely on his own adrenaline and steady hands. He doesn't have time for anything that wobbles, or whimpers, but on the cab ride home, he thinks Sherlock may have done both.

He ignores it because as long as John is there, Sherlock is allowed to wobble. That, John is starting to realize, is the point of John. It feels right, like something settled. He'd drifted after he had come home from a war; for so long, there hadn't _been _any point to John. John had been a series of verbs of varying levels of difficulties, wake up, John, clean your teeth, John, go for a walk. He'd had to prompt himself into each one, over and over, grudgingly.

Somehow, John and Sherlock are laughing. That is a thing John does, now. They get off at Baker Street and John goes to get the shock blanket. He considers it something like a souvenir.

"I know that isn't for me," Sherlock frowns, but allows John to tuck it around him anyways, looking like a put-out feline. John knew something about cats though. He makes a judgment call and brushed the backs of his fingers over Sherlock's forehead, meaning only to offer comfort, but stumbling onto an uncomfortable realization when Sherlock feels so much warmer than he'd expected.

John swallows around a suspicion. "Sherlock, when you said you spent a lot of time, and chemicals…"

"Oh, don't talk to me about legalities, John, it's tedious."

"A strange conclusion to leap to," John says, squinting at him. "So, shall I put you down as self-prescribed, self-made or _both_?"

"Honestly John," Sherlock ground out, "don't be ridiculous. You know who my father is. "

John doesn't actually, but that's Sherlock. John is almost pleased that Sherlock assumed he would know. He doesn't even have to ask: the question hovers heavy in the air.

"Mycroft and I's father is the Holmes half of H&H Pharmaceuticals."

John lets out a low whistle. "Your father is the world's leading expert in heat-suppressors."

Sherlock rolls his eyes. "Yes, John."

John's let Sherlock rabbit trail him from his original point. He redirects: "I think the stress may have derailed your chemically cultivated biology."

Sherlock sharpens in an instant. There is no better word for it: his shoulders rise to points and his eyes narrow, plush curve of a mouth pressing itself flat. John can feel the heat transfer from a foot away.

"Who can I call for you? Sherlock?"

"You've got to be…" Sherlock muttered, launching himself to his feet and stumbling for the hallway. John stayed rooted, listening to the sounds of the tap in the loo running, and what he assumed was Sherlock splashing his own face.

John's feet carry him to Sherlock, unbidden, when he hears him retch.

Sherlock is clutching a vial in one hand in a bloodless grip, and the other is braced above the sink.

"I, uh, don't really think there's anything to be done, at this point."

"Oh, is that your professional opinion, _doctor_?" Sherlock sneers, wiping his mouth, and John swallows down a flash of anger.

"Yes, actually. You probably should have been letting yourself go into at least one per year. This might not be happening."

"Having heats is rather counter-productive to the point of suppressors," Sherlock says, and he has to pause twice to get the sentence out. "A large enough dose of… human chorionic gonadotropin could…"

"Or it could send you into a tailspin. It's going to be unpredictable as it is." John curls his hand around the vial and Sherlock flinches. He looks terrified, defeated, and desperate. John knows what it's like to be hijacked by biology. "Let's go turn on your dehumidifier. There's still time to minimize."

Sherlock follows him joylessly, like a herded animal following the curved path. "I've been on suppressors entirely since adulthood," he tells John without looking at him. John adjusts the levels on his dehumidifier and it whirs to life, loudly, starting on the highest setting.

"Do you want to call your brother?"

"Out of the question."

"I know you don't get along, but this is –"

"Do not say that this is different, John. You have no idea."

"Well," John challenges, "who is on your C&C? You've got a few hours to make that call."

Sherlock mutters something into his hands. "Come again?"

"No one, John," he enunciates, with razor-sharp vowels.

"Okay," he says, calmly. "What would you like me to do? Shall I fetch you an aide, or call someone?"

"Don't be ridiculous, John. Who would come?" Sherlock starts unwinding his scarf, and John notices the sweat collecting in the lines of his unhappy forehead.

"Don't be stupid, Sherlock. Lestrade would. Mike, for another."

Sherlock turns a familiar look on John, and he holds out his palms, smiling faintly. "Don't deduce what you don't want to know."

He looks faintly disgusted. "That is quite enough, John."

When John met Sebastian Wilkes, he'd leaned in like he had a secret, on their first meeting. "We all hated him, at school."

_Well_, John thought. He moved his focus to the corner of his eye to see if Sherlock has responded in any way, and he hadn't. His posture was school-boy straight. Sebastian went on: "He went into heat in a lab, once.

"This doesn't seem the time or place to bring up childhood trauma," John said, frowning.

"It wouldn't be funny, of course," Sebastian said, looking at John, "but we'd all been so sure he was an alpha, the whole thing was quite the head-trip."

"Sounds like a riot," he'd snarled, grabbing Sherlock's hand. He could feel his pulse in his neck skyrocketing, and felt overheated, strangled by his jumper.

"What an…" John grumbled.

"Alpha." Sherlock finishes.

"Alphas," John agrees, grinning at his friend. They solved the case, because Sherlock is brilliant, and John added a few items to the list of things he will do in fear of Sherlock's life. John finds himself thinking of it now. _Alphas_, he'd snorted.

Sherlock's biology right now is ticking, volatile. "I'm telling you, you can weather this one alone, but after so long on suppressants, I think you should call someone you trust."

"There is no one, John. There is only you."

Everything was so complicated, now. John hated the politics of heats: the way he felt on the second day, when everything was suspended underwater and there was nothing but thick, miry _want _and no thought governing his behavior, just his layered hunger and wet genitals.

If Sherlock was going to dissolve into that – and considering the amount of suppressants he'd been on to forestall his heats indefinitely for so long – the next few days would be hellish. Sherlock would hate it, might hate himself upon coming up for air as his heat receded, but if John got involved, it would be more likely that he would hate him.

It would be so much easier if he'd let him call someone: Lestrade, or a professional, hell, John had spent Mike Stamford's last heat by his side as it began, just keeping him company as his wife was unavoidably detained by foul weather at the onset, and then his wife, beautiful and made of wide alpha planes, had asked him to stay. The whole thing had been lovely, and ended in a curry eaten in a nest of blankets. If John had called Mike or Nora he could rest assured that Sherlock would make it through his heat both safely (and likely pleasurably) but more importantly, with his friendship with John intact.

He had no such luck. Sherlock's face was carved out of aluminium, like all it would take to crumple him would be to grip too tightly.

Sherlock clawed at his own neck, and John thought of the way that people touched others how they hoped to be touched, and how he'd come out of his comfort zone to find John when he was riding out his heat, simply to scratch his back.

"Come on," John said, offering his friend his hand. "Let's get you to your room."

Sherlock was a bundle of nerves. "Biology is tedious," he said, frozen in his doorway.

"It can be," John allows, neutrally, turning the dial on his humidifier up to HIGH. "But I'd be lying if I said I'd never looked forward to a heat."

Sherlock feigned disinterest as he pulled his sleeve close to his face to brush at some imagined imperfection. "I—" he said, face obscured by his wrist, "might say any number of improbable and inappropriate things in the next forty eight hours."

John held both hands palm-up. "I won't hold anything you say at face value. We'll have a embargo on all emotions talk until after this is over."

Sherlock let out a long breath, like a punctured thing, and John could hear his fingernails drag over the skin of his wrist. "I'm going to go build you a sandwich. You should climb into a dressing gown, and adjust your card."

John came back without a sandwich. They hadn't been grocery shopping since the explosions, but he did find an apple and a jar of peanut butter. He went to carving with his pocket knife, and set them both on Sherlock's night stand, on top of a coffee-splattered stack of papers, beside the snow globe of a French attraction, and the small mountain of staples that held approximately nothing together.

Sherlock was in a dressing gown that John hadn't seen previously. He had something like a collection. "I mean to say," he said, as if he'd just arrived at the end of the speech and was summarizing. Perhaps he had been; it certainly would not be the first time he hadn't stopped speaking just because John wasn't in hearing range. "Perhaps I will ... make lewd suggestions. I will, ah, ask."

Sherlock looked pink around the tips of his ears. John didn't want to laugh at him, but the whole thing was so unbearable endearing. If he hadn't looked so frazzled, John would have reminded him that the whole thing was _just transport_.

_Beg_, he wanted to correct:_ you're going to beg. You're going to cry._ Instead, he leveled a look at him. "And? What do you want me to do?"

"It's not like you're_ physically equipped_," Sherlock said, adding a cruel twist to the words. John heard his teeth snap at the end of the sentence, like the sharp crack of punctuation on an old typewriter.

John wasn't phased, as he looked down at his arm, tucking his thumb into a fist exactly the way you wouldn't for a fight. His hands were small, but capable. "Huh," he mused. "That sort of looks like exactly what you're going to want."

"It's hardly the same thing, John," Sherlock says, as if John is being tedious. As if Sherlock isn't nude under his robe. Like Sherlock has the upper hand – all of the upper hands – and doesn't even need to grace John with his presence. John's blood would be boiling under the heat of the condescension coming off of his friend in waves if he couldn't see his trembling hands. He's trying to feel somewhat in control, he's not trying to make John feel small.

"Do you know that moment when you say, oh no, that couldn't possibly fit, please remove that from my genitals immediately? And the alpha dick who happens to be in your bed says the worst possible combination of words." Any combination will do. _Just take it, yes, so close, you're doing great, you'll love it when it's settled, you look so lovely on my cock, needy little slut, you've been begging for this, oh, you were made for my knot._

Sherlock's face is a storm cloud. He doesn't have to say yes.

"Oh, what a co-incidence," John says in a flat voice, "me too. And the thing about not being with an omega is, when you feel that feeling, we tend to say, alright then, squeeze my free hand while I pull it out. Either way. I'll give you what you need or I'll ignore you and keep you fed for three days while you sob. The question is, do you want me to be hands on, or do you just want me to bring you fluids and stand guard at the door?"

"It's all going to get… rather undignified, isn't it?"

John nodded at him. He had to look up at him, but he tried not to peer up through his eyelashes, like a proper omega. This was not a normal situation, and it would not be fair of John to use a sudden onset heat to his own advantage. Any pair of mates would batten down the hatches for this kind of situation. Just because John had been battling a weird attraction to Sherlock's asymmetrical slanted face and voice like a sultry bassline in 1940s jazz, did not mean anything. For all they'd talked about it, Sherlock might prefer betas, or brunettes or, hell, women. But mostly, as John understood it, there wasn't generally a preference.

All John knew was that his best friend had a complicated relationship with his own biology and a shared contempt for alphas in general, and more specifically, the alpha habit of delegating all reasoning and critical thinking skills to their knots.

"Yes," he agreed. "but it might not be terrible."

Sherlock inclined his head, and his face softened into an expression that still seemed miserable, but at least the affected contempt was gone. When he spoke, he sounded soft. Almost hesitant. The sound curled into him like a hot drink. "In that case, John… If you would be so kind…"

This time, when Sherlock's hand went to his shoulder, John caught it. "Lay down Holmes. I know your skin is crawling."

"Unbearably," he groaned.

It was strange to be returning the favor. John had thought about it a few times since Sherlock had put his fingernails against his own skin, putting out some of his fires while stoking others.

John tries to put all of his mixed up, tangled thoughts away as he moves his hands to Sherlock's back. He's still covered by his gown across his shoulders, and John starts innocuously enough: with one palm across his left shoulder blade and the other dragging a blunt, straight path up and down the other shoulder. Sherlock twitches under his fingers, and John chases the twitch until he's given most of his back the once over.

"You keep missing it," Sherlock groans into the crook of his elbow, where his face is hidden. The back of his neck is a dull red, and John gives is a gentle rub with his short nails and Sherlock shudders violently beneath him, in a strange rolling spasm.

"Did I just his the spot or the self-destruct button?" John asks, fingers hovering a millimeter from the soft, stray hairs at the base of Sherlock's skull, under his hairline, dying to try again.

"Nng," Sherlock replies, and John brushes his thumb against Sherlock's hairline, and down the first few inches of his spine. Sherlock squirms under his touch, and John has to bite into his lip to keep in the laugh that wants to come out as an amused exhalation. John brings his hands away, back to scratching, following cues and Sherlock's own muscular tension.

"Pull this down," he suggests, tugging at the fabric – it's weird, slippery to the touch, but rough in others – and Sherlock complies not by shimmying it down his hips to drape over his bum like John had expected, but by flinging it off the side of his bed, to join the rest of his mess.

The skin across Sherlock's back is so pale, like nothing warm has ever touched it but his great coat – not a lover's touch, or the sun. Sherlock keeps arching, rising to meet him. He has four moles, and John avoids them all out of idle curiosity to see if Sherlock has mapped out the bits of himself that he wouldn't see under many ordinary circumstances, and what he will deduce from his actions.

"How long has it been since you've had a proper heat?" John asks, trailing his fingers down the back of Sherlock's arms in a way that makes his hand curl reflexively five or six times. He stays in the same place but adds pressure to stop tickling his friend.

"I was," Sherlock says, still muffled. "Ah, in my twenties. I tried to disappear from familial obligations, and it took considerably longer than I'd anticipated to get my own version functional."

John let out a low whistle. "Years?"

"I'm not worried about infertility."

"Oh, I'm shocked," John grins, and Sherlock looks at him over his arm, muscles soft, and Sherlock smiles back at him.

That's not the only complication with long-term heat suppressants, but John isn't sure where Sherlock's hormones are, so it doesn't seem like the time to pry. Things are going to get so literally and metaphorically messy in the upcoming week that he is doing his best to keep from betraying Sherlock's trust. Using his chemical imbalance to pry into his medical and sexual history just doesn't seem _on _.

"All of the itches have migrated."

"Oh?" John says, pulling his hands back. Sherlock flips over onto his back before John has time to brace himself – for a creature who spends so much of his time sedentary, when Sherlock is ready to _move_; it's like a magic trick,_ now you see me_.

John draws his fingertips across Sherlock's chest, his long lean torso a mess of cartography: knobby ribs and the occasional scar. He has a few scattered moles on the front, as well, and he scratches around them as well for a lark.

He tries to keep his eyes on Sherlock's face, keep himself from looking downward. Sherlock's eyes are closed, but knowing him, he'd feel the intensity of John's gaze. He half expects him to shush him now, because he's thinking too loudly.

Johns fingertips reach up to Sherlock's neck, where he was clawing earlier. He brushes across the red marks with the callused flat of his thumb, and Sherlock's neck jumps beneath his hands.

"I'd forgotten how overwhelming these things are."

"Would you like me to leave you alone for a few hours, before things get…?"

"Please don't," Sherlock says.

John rests the pad of his index finger over Sherlock's Adams apple and it trembles beneath him.

There's something John's wanted to do for some time, now, and it seems like the moment has finally come. Sherlock, stretched supine across the bed, his stomach bared beneath him in a way that made it seem completely vulnerable, and John trying and failing not to look at his cock, little and pink and demure at the fork of his legs, and John thinks to himself, if this is never going to happen again, he might as well go for it. John settles himself behind Sherlock, still fully clothed himself, and buries both hands in his hair.

"Oh!" Sherlock gasps, squeezing his eyes tightly shut. His pheromones, which have been hazy and faint, but obviously present, are starting to align. John loves the heady mix of omega scents, and that Sherlock-scent in particular, which he's always kept masked under his clinical neutral wash. John puts all of his focus into carding through Sherlock's silky hair, dragging careful touches across his scalp like he's making a new discovery. For long minutes, Sherlock rocks his head back and forth in his hands, hands shifting restlessly for purchase in the sheets around him.

"Too much?" John asks, stilling.

"No, John. I need… I…"

John knows, actually. He can feel Sherlock's pheromones now with some sense he can't pin, like phantom hands pulling at his collar.

"In the past," Sherlock says, "I have not particularly been stimulated by penetration."

"Meaning, during heat you haven't felt compelled to be penetrated?"

Sherlock flushed. "I have. But, I don't typically…" Sherlock made a vague hand gesture that John assumed meant, ejaculate. It was funny: this man who could look unflinchingly into the heart of darkness, dissect patterns of criminal behavior with a look, and categorically knew of all the ways one could become deceased on an innocuous vacation to the tropics, but have him talking about his own preferences and genitals, and suddenly he was a school boy. "I just don't want you to think you're doing anything wrong."

"Huh." John moves, again, around Sherlock. He is beginning to feel like he's in Sherlock's orbit, as he nestles himself between Sherlock's legs, bringing his face up close to Sherlock's penis. "I'm an omega, Sherlock. I have no desire to treat your dick like it's ornamental."

John nosed Sherlock at the join, scented him at the heat of his groin. He pressed a kiss to Sherlock's pelvis, feeling his pulse at the tip of his tongue. And then directed his attention to the organ in question. "Hello, lovely," he smiled, before ghosting his lips across its peachy head.


	4. Chapter 4

By the time John was an adult, John had learned something that was quite a letdown: Alphas, by and large, do not do participate in oral sex.

He hadn't had anyone explain it to him during puberty, or presentation, with his beta mother and his alpha father who was too embarrassed to even bring up the area of sex with his omega son. It was Harry that dad related to.

Actually, it was Harry that got along with everyone, bypassing the Watson extended-family tradition of only being civil with one member at a time. Harry charmed mum, had things in common with dad, spun John around when she came home from uni on the weekends, even though by then John was a teenager and too big for that.

But even Harry, with her unapologetic predilection for members of her permutation and seemingly all-encompassing knowledge of all things related to gender and sexuality had never told him, "if you ever want to get off in someone's mouth, Johnny, I'd recommend anything but an Alpha."

Sherlock looked like a wonder: his hair splayed across his pillow like something posed and precise; his pillowcase the stark backdrop of hundreds of Fibonacci sequences. He looked like an equation.

John was still grinning up at him as he brushed his nose against the tip of his penis playfully. Sherlock's eyes shuttered closed, and John put the tip against his bottom lip, humming a little. One of his hands curled around the back of Sherlock's thigh, drawing lazy circles on his skin with his fingertips, and the spread across his largely vestigal bollocks, brushing his thumb over the flat, undescended curves of them. Sherlock, above him, squirms; "Yes, John, please."

His Sherlock, who is made of jagged edges and self-control has already started to sound like he is losing the threads of coherent thought, and John's heart gives a painful kick. "I've got you," he murmurs, leaning forward to put the tip of him in his mouth, making a warm, wet curve around it.

The whole experience is surreal, and uniquely Sherlock. He smells like himself, more like himself than John has ever experiences, and tastes like skin and omega and John can't help but panic a little: he wishes he could store this like a film, as it's happening – lock it away in a mind-vault like Sherlock does. This may be his only chance to do this, to_ have_ this, and after this heat, Sherlock may not even want to look at him.

John is going to do this right, because he has to, and because Sherlock deserves it. John moves his hands as he lowers himself down, his lips coming level with the base of Sherlock's cock, swiping his tongue along the point of protrusion on the underside as the blunt tip pokes against the roof of his mouth. He traces the outline of Sherlock's seam, which is damp and heated, brushing against it with his knuckles as he follows the path from one end of it to the other, past it to touch his arse, and coming back up, tickling his bollocks again as John begins to suckle in earnest.

Sherlock shifted his hips, arching off the bed, and John slipped his other hand under him, supporting him at the small of his back with a firm hand. Sherlock's hands scrambled for purchase, warping his sheets in long grasping pulls. John imagines they were insanely expensive, on principal. His elbow, which is the only unclothed bit of him to touch Sherlock's sheet, feels like it is resting on a cloud.

"John!" Sherlock says, and in his mouth it becomes a prayer, an invective, a swear.

John moves up and down, swiftly, although Sherlock's compact penis fits comfortably in his mouth, keeping a tight grip on his dense flesh. John pulls hard, putting enough suction in his mouth that Sherlock makes a startled noise, his hips surging up seemingly without his consent. "What do you need, Sherlock?"

"In," he says, wild-eyed, and sitting up. He looks so disoriented (and almost silly, now that he's up, legs splayed with his erection looking cheerful and kiss-flushed between his legs) that John wants to kiss his lower lip. Instead, he presses a quick parting kiss to Sherlock's cock, and crawls up, putting his nose against Sherlock's neck, where his scent glands are. He inhales deeply, hands wandering up Sherlock's stomach, ribcage, and eventually landing at his shoulder. He is so hungry for Sherlock's skin.

John fluttered his eyelashes over Sherlock's clavicle, which is something he'd discovered he was wild about in uni, with his first omega girlfriend. She'd taken an art class that semester and he hadn't been able to look at a paintbrush in a deft, capable hand without getting hard for years.

Sherlock lets out a low noise, and John can feel it resonate through his whole body. He pushed his mouth against the pulse of Sherlock's neck, not quite a kiss, and moved to get up.

"What—?"

"Stay right here," John says, grinning. "I'll be right back."

John does his best to hurry, collecting a thing or two from his personal supplies and almost tripping down the stairs on the way back down. He checks the front door for good measure, both of the locks slotted into place.

When he gets back to Sherlock's room, John is taken aback by the sight. Sherlock appears to have taken the liberties of pressing half of his hand into his own seam. "John," he groans as soon as he identifies him in the doorway. "Come help. This isn't working," he mewls pitifully.

"Course it isn't," John shrugs, trying to sound amused and not the closest he's been to coming in his pants since his school years. "It's hard to get the right angle without dislocating your shoulder."

"Do something about it," Sherlock nearly growls, and when John raises an eyebrow, he adds, "please." in the most disingenuous voice John has heard come out of his mouth.

John moves to him, hand still moving between his legs, and climbs onto Sherlock's bed. "Do you want me to, ah, continue what we were doing before, plus something for your internal needs, or do you want to try something else?"

Sherlock's penis is still wet. John makes brief, hungry eye-contact with its little head, before looking back at Sherlock and waiting for his answer. Sherlock, wide eyed, simply stares at him. "That was…" he finally says, sounding shocked and mildly accusatory, "incredible."

"We'll get back to it, then, shall we?"

John puts one hand on the top of Sherlock's thigh, tense, lean muscle rippling beneath his hand as he does, and the other hand slides down the slick entrance of his seam. His first finger eases in with no resistance, and he strokes Sherlock from the inside as he lowers his mouth back down onto the unyielding flesh below him. He smiles around it as Sherlock's breathing changes: little hiccupy breaths, intense, but calmer now that John is inside him, a bit.

John reaches one hand up, and rests it in the hollow at the base of Sherlock's throat so he can be privy to every concave stutter of breath. John is so warm, from the factual heat at the tips of his ears to the less literal swirling in his stomach.

Early on in med school, John had been taught a song, the beat of which is the right tempo to give a person CPR. For some reason, that memory chooses that moment to filter up his consciousness, and John tries not to laugh as he starts up that tempo in undulating sucks_ ah-ah-ah-ah staying alive._

John keeps a rhythm for long moments, stroking clockwise circles at Sherlock's throat until Sherlock takes his hand, moves it, and for a second John thinks Sherlock is wordlessly asking him to stroke his face, as he removes it from his throat, up past his neck, chin… John almost chokes when Sherlock sucks down his two fingers. Sherlock seems to be mimicking John, keeping the same pace, doing the same things John is doing with his fluttering tongue.

John is glad his clothes are still on, because he's embarrassingly hard, probably leaking. John groans around his mouthful of Sherlock, and beneath him, Sherlock's abdomen trembles, like a plucked violin string. John wants to draw this out, but he knows, objectively, that he has at least forty-eight hours to go, so instead, he moves to put another finger in. As soon as he seats his hand against the Sherlock's seam, his friend scrapes his teeth along the bottom of John's fingers and John doesn't have a free hand to palm his own cock, so instead he presses his hips down on Sherlock's bed, trying to get the blunt pressure to take the edge off.

Sherlock says his name carefully, around a mouthful of his fingers, and John presses his forehead against Sherlock's stomach, feeling the sparse, wiry hairs between Sherlock's bellybutton and his penis against his nose. "Have pity," Sherlock says, and it comes out muffled, but John moves anyways, easing his small hand inside of Sherlock, and moving his other hand out of Sherlock's (damp, hot, glorious) mouth.

Nearly as soon as his hand is positioned where he knows it should be, the shape of it optimized for the blooming, blunt pressure where a knot would put it, and tugging gently outward to create a seal and press it tight against the opening of his seam from the inside, Sherlock's cock begins to twitch in his mouth in tandem with the tightening of his pelvic floor muscles. "Mmmmm," John mouthes around him, as Sherlock dissolves into a litany of_ please please please John yes you are yes please._

When Sherlock's minimal ejaculate arrives near the back of John's mouth, he swallows around him, and rests his forehead again against Sherlock's heaving tummy, without spitting him out. There is a little drool at the base of Sherlock and around John's chin, but not a lot.

Sherlock, for his part, seems to be in a haze, and John closes his eyes while he waits for Sherlock to ask him to vacate. With a real knot, you might be stuck for an hour together, but John knows he usually tires of being knotted after about five minutes of aftershocks. John had once have a lover hold him in her mouth for the entirety of that five minutes and only the fact that John was so deeply closeted had kept him from announcing it to everyone he'd interacted with that month.

He breathed in and out slowly, through his nose, and kept his mouth snug but completely still around Sherlock's cock. "John," Sherlock croaked, his hands drawing through John's hair. John wasn't crazy about having his scalped touched, but he'd seen the way Sherlock obviously felt about the gesture and was touched by the reciprocal token all the same. He looked up at him, mouth still flush against his pelvic bone.

"You don't have to…"

John tried to formulate a question with the top half of his face, eyes unconcerned and a questioning eyebrow._ Do you want me off?_

Sherlock sighed and laid backwards, still sending tender touches from behind John's ears to the crown of his head, around and back down, across his temples. After a few minutes, and a neck cramp, Sherlock tugged him up by his ears, and John eased off at both points of contact, sitting up and flexing his cramping hand.

"May I take care of that?" he said, gesturing at John's lower body.

John took a good look at him, now that they were both sitting up and at eye-level with each other. Sherlock, John was delighted to note, looked positively _wrecked_.

He grinned at his friend as he went for his sweater, eager, and Sherlock took over the job, tugging at the cotton and tossing it to the floor. "I've not done this in quite some time," Sherlock said, a caveat, "so the technique might take me a while to sort out."

John looked down as Sherlock unbuttoned his trousers, the front of his cotton pants damp, and didn't have the heart to tell him that Sherlock was going to_ breathe on him_ and he was going to come like a sixth former.

"I'm sure it'll be fine."

Sherlock's pupils were huge; medically implausible. Desire picked up right where it had left off when he'd sat still for long minutes with Sherlock at rest in his mouth, leaving sparks in its wake, like a waking limb. "John, I've never … I mean, I have, had experiences, but never… never anything like that. You have to, tell me what you like."

John could feel his pulse in his fingertips, and brought one hand to Sherlock's face, with a mischievous smile. "There is something."


	5. Chapter 5

John directs Sherlock up against his headboard, and wraps his hand around his bony ankle to put the sole of one foot against the other. Sherlock looks faintly amused, and frankly a little too smug for an omega that should still be softened and pliant by the wash of hormones.

"Why are you smirking?" John says, climbing into his lap after stepping out of his trousers and pants. John is delighted to discover that the fit is like a bespoke suit, his bum cradled in the warm geometric hollow of Sherlock's pose, his thighs crossing over Sherlock's.

Sherlock blinks in surprise at the way he and John are suddenly face to face. "This seems a little undignified."

John snorts. "You just made a squishing sound, if we want to get technical about being undignified."

Sherlock huffs and looks away.

"Hey," John says, frowning. He puts two fingers against the line of Sherlock's jaw to angle his face back towards himself. "Do you want me to stop?"

Sherlock doesn't say yes, which seems promising, but he eventually does open his mouth so say, "This must look so … twee."

John knows that attitude, dealt with it while training to be a doctor, when he'd had his first public queer relationship. He'd been with a gorgeous, funny minx of an omega, clever and mad as a coatrack, and well-muscled alphas were always quick to point out that he'd eventually "grow out of" his sexuality like a schoolgirl.

"Anyone that you've ever heard that turn of phrase from is probably off having insipid sex with people who are not Sherlock Holmes," John says, in a soft voice. He brushes the pad of his thumb across Sherlock's cheek, the skin soft and pliant over his prominent facial bones. Sherlock, to his mild surprise, turns in to the gesture.

John moves again to settle himself snugly into the negative space of Sherlock's body, John's legs curving behind the small of Sherlock's back. Sherlock seemed to be experiencing the common omega experience of a heat negating the refractory period and he looked down to his compact, tidy erection with something like surprise. "That's… something," Sherlock mused.

John bites back a laugh, and instead, smudges a fluttering touch across it to make sure Sherlock isn't too sensitive. "Ah," Sherlock says on an exhale, most articulate.

"Yes?" he says, curling his hand more substantially around Sherlock's unflagging penis.

"Please," Sherlock sighs, leaning forward to touch his forehead to John's. An errant curl ends up in John's mouth. This time, John doesn't force his laugh to retreat, and instead lets it come out in a genuinely joyful surge.

"What," Sherlock bites out, petulantly, hurt or offended under the sneer. John doesn't know when he's learned that being openly wounded doesn't get you far in life. He isn't sure if he is allowed, or if Sherlock will hit him when he is in his right mind again, but he angles his face into the minimal airspace between them and kisses Sherlock's plush, pouting bottom lip.

His best friend makes a noise of surprise into his mouth and John thinks_ at least I'll die having heard that sound_ and then Sherlock's mouth becomes mobile against his, moving awkwardly at first, but eagerly. This kiss goes wet too soon, and Sherlock scrapes his teeth against John's bottom lip that he finds cringingly strange.

Sherlock moves back and John has an apology in his mouth almost immediately, but instead of what he'd expects (from the more realistic_ Sherlock sneering at him about sentiment, Sherlock's cool veneer back in place over his hunger_, to the outlandish_ Sherlock's head magically cleared of heat by John's perceived ineptitude_) Sherlock looks away briefly, and speaks to the ceiling. "I need a do-over."

John does not need to be asked twice, and blurs his mouth over Sherlock's again, slowly, sweetly, and paired with a slow rocking of his pelvis against Sherlock's.

Sherlock's mouth moves against John's tentatively this time, warm and agile and friendly, and John had a fleeting memory of watching him shoot off a deduction and wondering how those lips worked, decontextualized. He knew now, there was no going back; it was a fundamental change at a molecular level. John kisses him for long minutes, one hand curled around the back of Sherlock's hair as his fingertips gently worked their way to his scalp, the other hand wrapped around their cocks, sliding together like a mirror of their mobile kisses.

John disengages from Sherlock's mouth, lipping at his jaw and nosing at his neck, breathing hot air at the skin over his scent gland. John watches Sherlock's pulse point jump into action beneath the ghost of a non-touch, just mobile carbon and nitrogen and oxygen, and scrapes his teeth across it, grinning against the hot skin of Sherlock's collarbone when he lets out a strangled noise.

The room is swirling with pheromones and heat and genuine affection, and even Sherlock's dehumidifier running on full blast can't keep John from getting mixed up. "Want you," he mutters, which was a last minute trade from the other phrase in his mouth. He wanted to spit it out, like an insect he'd suddenly felt in a swallow of tea, but he is clear headed enough to know that one is, well, probably true, but not appropriate during helping-a-friend-out sex, and any response wouldn't really be Sherlock-with-the-light's-on.

"Then have me," he says, in a strange voice, and he seems to remember he has hands, bringing them up from John's waist to shoulders in a slow path that raided gooseflesh on the side of his ribcage. John grips him tightly with the muscles of his thighs, and Sherlock sighs, face dropping to the nub of John's shoulder.

John keeps rocking into Sherlock, genitals sliding like the tide, and Sherlock was the cliffside he was breaking against. John came with his face pressed against Sherlock's neck, starbursts behind his eyes and his name like complicated benediction in his mouth, half prayer and half damnation. After a brief moment of tight-eyed recovery, he reaches both hands down to cup Sherlock, sliding and gripping until he follows John into sated bonelessness with a slew of consonants and very few vowels.

The heady mess of what John considers the "second day" comes sometime in the predawn hours, when Sherlock is trying to sleep, but instead is only succeeding in having the loudest stroppy silence that John had even been privy to. The change was immediately noticeable, like someone had snuffed out the fire that usually backlit Sherlock; his body was still there, but there was little of the luminosity that John had come to associate with him.

"John, John, John," Sherlock cries, thrashing around, and unable to get comfortable.

"I'm here," he assures him, even though he is inconsolable. It makes John sick to his stomach, for this misery to be paired inside Sherlock with a vast, untouchable lust. For hours, he gives Sherlock what he needs, but may or may not want. It's the years of suppressants, John suspects, and the fact that Sherlock still had them in his system when the stress brought on a spontaneous heat. John suspects that means they've measured a Richter seven through a pillow to absorb the shock.

Sherlock calms for minutes at a time, clenching more and more weakly around John's hand as the second day goes on, and later around one of John's aids as John uses both of his hands to scratch gently at Sherlock's irritated back, stomach, calves and temples.

Sometimes his name comes out in the babble, and John talks back to him. He makes him eat every few hours, pets his hip while he sleeps fitfully, sweaty, sheets tangled into wiry knots. On the third day, John – stressed and exhausted and unbearably hungry – feels Sherlock's forehead and finds it cool to the touch while he naps on his side. The sheets are grimy despite John's best efforts, and the fact that he's gone through a dozen towels, piled in a disgusting heap a few feet from the bed.

He is though, equal parts relieved and head-buzzingly anxious, and he drags his small hand from Sherlock's forehead into his hair, following the contours of his cranium with fingertips until Sherlock begins to rustle. "Hey," he says. "I think you'll be wanting a shower."

Sherlock blinks slowly at him, before raising a hand in front of his face and curling his dexterous fingers, as if he is checking to make sure his body is once again synthesized with his brain, and that both are once again firmly under his control.

Sherlock mutters something that sounds like gratitude as he practically leaps off of his bed, not bothering with pants or a dressing gown. John strips the sheets when he goes, unease settling in a metallic tangle near his vocal chords as he tosses them into the pile of disgusting towels.

He practices what he is going to say while he does it, and because Sherlock takes a much longer shower than usually, John keeps practicing. In his head, he keeps rearranging all of the things he needs to say to Sherlock, changing the order, adding and deleting like a blog post.

When Sherlock finally comes back to his room, John has been lost in thought for some time, staring at his linens. He hovers in the door, flushed almost red with boiling water, and covered at the hips with the sole towel John had left in the bathroom. Before John has a chance to say any of it, Sherlock frowns deeply.

"John, I need you to go."

John should have expected that, but instead it comes out of left field to crash into his chest. Like a small meteor, or a stray bullet.

John goes.


	6. Chapter 6

"What did you cock-up this time?"

"The fact that my sister always assumes I've cocked something up when I come calling is not incentive for me to come visit," John grumbled.

"Except, of course, when you have," Harry pointed out. John hadn't even brought a bag to keep this exact moment from happening.

"I'm not sure if I have," John admitted, and his beautiful sister stepped aside to let him in.

After John showered, emerging smelling like strawberries and honey, Harry went to get a pack of cards, because if Watson's have one thing in common, it's the draw of the gamble. She went to get her bedside table jar of change and doles out equal measures of change. "Can I get you a coffee?" she asked, before she sat down to deal.

John shook his head.

Harry settles down with a soft drink in hand. She told him a while ago, when she'd been serious about being sober for the first time, that she'd had to switch to diet beverages because she was always thirsty. "Okay, Johnny. What happened with your omega friend?"

"Can we at least pretend for the first round that's not why I'm here?" John groaned.

"Sure." Harry cut the deck a half dozen times. "Actually, no. Feel free to come by when things are going swimmingly to stop future assumptions. Nothing you can do about the present, though."

John groaned. "I helped Sherlock through his heat, Harry."

Harry looked unphased by the news that his presumed transbeta flatmate experiences heats. It was part of her charm; she fell apart at the sight of spiders and wine stains on tablecloths but in the face of bullet-wound aftercare and natural disasters and gender identity surprises, she was completely unflappable. "And?"

"And, I don't know what it is going to do to our friendship," he said, surveying his cards. Sherlock, he realized for the first time, would have an incredible brain for odds-games. He should take him to a casino one night, see how long it would take him to get thrown out.

"It's hard to have casual sex with friends," she said, "you know, for people like you."

"People like me?" John bristled.

Harry laughed, "you know me too well to pretend I meant omegas. I meant people who are in love with their flatmates."

"He asked me to leave after." John said, and won everything because she must have assumed the fact that he couldn't keep his eye from twitching was related to his cards.

"Sorry Johnny. You know my lilo is your lilo," she said, flipping over another card. After a moment, she added, "You're a good man, John."

After John had won it all, and lost it all, and flopped back dramatically on her sofa, she tossed him his coat. "You need to get out."

"I can't think of anything I want to do right now besides mope, Harry."

"Good thing I can," she said, twisting her long hair to one side and tying it with an elastic. "Up, up, up."

John groaned and put his jacket on, because old habits die hard, and following Harry's lead was definitely an old habit.

John started to get suspicious as Harry drove past all the places he expected her to stop to watch a match, windows down because she'd always thought April wind was for appreciating. "Are we going where I think we are?"

Harry smirked at him in response, signaling and then merging into another lane.

"I can't believe you're still a member." John said, and started to feel anticipation tingle in his fingertips.

"I actually let it lapse for a while," Harry admitted, as she pulled in to park at the London Gun Club. "When I was at my worst, I couldn't keep a target in my sights. _That _was rock bottom."

"You told mum that rock bottom was missing her birthday party because you'd passed out in a root cellar." John raised one eyebrow at her.

"Well of _course _I'd tell mum that. How well do you think she'd react if she knew I was more devastated by being unable to hit a grouse?"

"You're wasted on a life of academia," John laughed. It certainly wasn't a new thought. John had grown up watching his alpha sister with unbridled jealousy: she'd had a motorbike when she was just a teen, and a string of scarred, bar fighting alphas that John had secretly harbored crushes on. She seemed to find some new adrenaline fix at every opportunity.

John had spent his entire adolescence wanting to be her, and then she'd turned seventeen and decided her rebellious years were over, just like that. She'd went to King's College with her six A-Levels, seemingly content while John was left reeling in the fact that no one seemed to be willing to extend the phrase "alphas will be alphas" to his own teenage behavior.

"I prefer my excitement to be on domestic soil," Harry shrugged, stepping out of her car and towards the welcome center, leaving her little brother to trot out after her.

He didn't think about Sherlock for a solid three hours, and it didn't occur to him that he hadn't thought about Sherlock until they were almost home, ears still ringing and a stupid grin on his face.

And only then because it hit him Harry had been en route to _Baker Street_, instead of her flat. "Harry!" he yelped.

"You either need to talk to him or pick up some clothes," she said, unflustered. "I'll wait out here for fifteen minutes. Try not to get chucked out."

John kissed her cheek. "You're a goddess, Harry."

"Yeah, yeah, let's hear that outside a foxhole some time," she groused, but she was smiling.

"Let's have dinner," he said.

"We'll do something, Right now you need to go_ talk to Sherlock_."

He let himself in, but was sure to make noise on the way up the stairs, so as not to surprise his flatmate.

He half-expected him to be out, solving a crime on his own to show John that his presence wasn't necessary in some act of self-perseveration. That, or embroiled in half a dozen experiments as if nothing had happened.

What he hadn't expected was to find the living room furniture squashed against the walls, the kitchen clean, all of the cans in the pantry, and Sherlock sitting in the middle of their newly cleared expanse of living room floor in the lotus pose, clearly deeply entrenched in his mind palace. To bring to perspective how ludicrous his life was, now that Sherlock was a part of it, Sherlock was draped in a white sheet, like a greek statue.

"Sherlock?" he asked, cautiously in the doorway. Sherlock didn't move or acknowledge John's presence in any way, but he was never sure exactly what percolated into Sherlock's thoughts when he was like this, so he went ahead just in case. "I'm just here to get some clothes. Unless you've had enough… space."

Sherlock's eyes were open, but keenly focused on something John knew was not in this room, his hands twitching tensely at his side.

"Are you okay? Should I call your brother?"

_That_, apparently, was piercing enough.

"No, John," Sherlock spat. "If you're first resort when I am thinking is to_ call Mycroft _when I am _thinking_, I am going to have to rethink my housing arrangements."

"I'm sorry," John said. "I'll just get my things."

"You can tell Harry she can leave," Sherlock said, reclining into a dignified sprawl on the floor, and his genitals made a small but noticeable landmark under the expanse of thin white sheet. John stood there, his mouth not quite closed. Sherlock made a dismissive hand gesture.

John considered himself dismissed, and went upstairs. He pressed his eyes to the ceiling until the sun slanted through his blinds. In the morning he felt old, older than he had in a long time, unrested and rumbled and with joints that groaned when he lifted his arm for his jumper.

Sherlock was sitting outside his door when he opened it. Sherlock always gave John the impression of a bird with feathers pitched against the grain: he seemed so much larger than his mass. In a narrow hallway, he dominated the space unequivocally. "Hello," John said, slowly.

"The problem, John," Sherlock said, as if his position, tone, and the fact that he was still in his sheet from the day before at ten in the morning were all perfectly valid life choices. "Is that Moriarty is still at large, I do not know what sort of phone call would distract him from whatever he came to the pool to do."

"Okay," John said, He was accustomed to being a prop for Sherlock's reasoning, providing him with an audience as he dragged himself through his own conclusions.

He continued: "The problem is expounded by the fact that that I have had an extremely draining biological reaction and the foyer of my mind palace is in disarray. I am figuratively having a lot of trouble accessing any facts of actual importance."

"To be fair," John frowned, latching onto the only thing Sherlock had said that he had a contribution in, "your _biological reaction_ was a bit out of scale because you've kept your biology under a militant chemical rule for over a decade."

Sherlock's focus tightened on John as he sprang to his feet, getting close to him; John's breathing went on temporary hiatus as his blood bubbled to a boil under the heat of Sherlock's gaze. "Go on," Sherlock said, looming in John's personal space.

John though about the desperate throes of Sherlock's heat, crying and miserable and still unsatisfied even during orgasms. "I doubt if you were on a regular cycle, you would have had such an extreme reaction. Added to the fact that you were still on heat-suppressants when you went into heat," John said, concluding with a low whistle.

"Continue." Sherlock demanded, in a ragged voice.

John shrugged. "That's about it, mate. You can start yourself back up, but I'd recommend going to see a hysterologist first."

"But in your_ medical opinion_…"

"In my medical opinion, you should go off suppressants for some time. You should also have a full work-up done, but the least you can do for your reproductive system. But you don't really keep me around for my medical expertise."

"In your… practical experience, then," Sherlock said, and then paused before turning on his heel towards the sound of his phone.

John stood in the hallways with his pulse racing until it slowed before he followed Sherlock downstairs.

By the time he'd made it down to their disaster site of a living room, Sherlock was looking bleakly at the wall, phone pressed to the side of his head. "Oh," he said, in a clipped voice, and then: "I can't come, but I will send my field agent."

John assumed that was him, and began paying closer attention to the conversation, but it is over quickly.

"I need you to go to Barts and fetch the samples Molly has for me," he said, not looking at John. Something occurred to him, then. Sherlock wasn't trying to drive him mad, Sherlock was_ chafed and_ _sore_.

John's feet carried him to the door as he turned that over in his mind. "Fine, but when I get back, I want all of the food-stuffs back in the pantry—" he called upstairs as he opened the door, planning already his Tescos stop for something to soothe his fitful flatmate.

"Hello, John," Mycroft said, pleasantly, but with a menacing grip on his umbrella.

"Hold please," John replied, mechanically, and shut the door in his face.


End file.
